The Last English Poachers

by Bob

  I has a cool shed set up in the yard behind my house and we drag the stag in there and hangs him and then goes in to take our rest. It’s dinnertime, because we always has dinner in the middle of the day,which is proper, with supper in the evenings. Cora and my young daughter June’s cooked us pheasant and potatoes and mashed-up swede, that we grows ourselves, and we wolfs it down because we’re starving with the hunger of our exertions. Then I drive down to the village pub for a well-earned drink. Brian leaves Cora and June to clear up and goes out to tend to the dogs.

  We has eight greyhounds here at the house and they need walking for five miles on a hard surface to keep their pads up. Later, when they’re fed and watered, and the spaniels too, he’ll go back inside and wait for me to come home from the pub. June knows I’ll be a bit belligerent, like I sometimes gets after twenty pints, so she slopes off to bed. But Brian waits to hear about the arguments and the aftermath of the rows and ructions and to stop me from breaking up the furniture. Again.

  Next day, after I sobers up, I skins the stag and dresses it and cuts its head off. Brian gets rid of the head and antlers by dumping them somewhere secluded, far away from the house. The keepers on the estate know all their beasts and it won’t be long before they notice this big fella’s missing. Then the coppers will be snooping round and we don’t want ’em finding his head and antlers anywhere near us.

  The day after, the animal is jointed up and the meat sold and distributed among the people who owns that deer just as much as the earls of bloody Berkeley Castle.

  2

  Bob – The Early Years

  My name is Bob Tovey and I’m a poacher. I was born on 21 February 1938 in the Royal Infirmary, Bristol. My parents were Robert and Beatrice Tovey and they came from a small village in South Gloucestershire and that’s where I grew up. My father was a poacher before me, along with being a butcher and slaughterman. He had a small shop called ‘R S Tovey – Butcher’ opposite the town hall clock in the High Street. The clock was very old and the only one like it in the world. The mechanism was operated by a rope and, in wet weather, it would run three minutes slow – it ran three minutes fast in summer, because of the tautness of the rope. So it only ever told the right time in the spring and in the autumn.

  My father taught me many things about animals: how to castrate a cat and de-bristle a pig and shoot a dog and kill a sheep with a piece of rope. Now, you might be thinking these things is cruel and inhumane but, in the ways of the countryside, they ain’t. If the tomcat don’t get castrated, he goes about trying to service the queans in heat and howling his head off at night and spraying everywhere and roaming and fighting and getting stud-tailed and blood poisoned – which is probably what he deserves. But it’s kinder to castrate him.

  Pigs is de-bristled after they’re dead, so that ain’t cruel now, is it? My father would lay a bed of straw and get the pig onto it and shoot it with a humane killer. He’d cut its throat and tip it up to get the blood out, then sprinkle straw all over the carcass and burn it. It was a lovely smell. I used to help clean the chitlin, then boil and plait ’em, so nothing got wasted, not even the trotters. He’d cut the pig in half and lay it on two flat tombstones that he’d nicked from the local churchyard and rub a mixture of salt, saltpetre and brown sugar into it. The liquor would run down and be collected underneath and he’d pour it back over the bacon – over and over. Then he’d joint it and wrap it in muslin cloth and it’d keep for ages. Mother would soak it before cooking and make Lazarus pie from bits of backbone the size of your fist with the meat still on, cooked with stock and pastry on top – and I never tasted nothing like it in my whole life.

  Butchering a sheep was done with a rope; he’d tie two back legs and one front leg and put his fingers up the animal’s nose, then he’d pull its head back and cut its throat, tip it up to get the blood out and gut it and skin it. It was quick and considerate and, despite what people might think, my father taught me to respect life and to do what was needed to be done without getting all sentimental over it. During and after the war, when there was rationing, he’d go round the farms and I’d keep watch while he slaughtered and butchered black-market animals that the farmers hadn’t declared to the ministry men. He’d be paid sometimes with money and other times with meat.

  One time he killed a pig for a farmer and carried it a mile and a half on his shoulders back to the slaughterhouse and went to hang it up, but there was a woman already hanging there on the hook. She’d killed herself. The old man dropped the pig and cut her down and checked she was dead and went to get her husband. Nobody knew why she did it, apart from her husband being a miserable bastard and maybe she just couldn’t stick living with him no longer.

  So I knew a bit about death and animals right from an early age. All kinds of animals, including dogs. And dogs to me is for working, not for pets. If a dog can’t earn its keep it needs to go. Better to shoot it than ill-treat it or turn it out to starve to death like some does. Shooting’s more humane than taking a dog to the vets – it’s quicker and the dog don’t know what’s coming until it’s over. You take a dog to the vet and it knows something bad’s going to happen. It gets to fretting long before the injection kills it. So there’s no use saying to me I got no appreciation of animals. It ain’t true – I got more than you!

  But this book ain’t about domestic animals, nor farm animals neither. It’s about wild animals and the kinship between a poacher like me and the creatures that live and roam wild in this country we calls ours.

  The village where I grew up was a small place before people spilled out here from Bristol and other towns besides. It was just one street and butts for archery surrounded by land – farmland and big estates belonging to the aristocracy, earls and lords and dukes and the like. There was no television back in my boyhood days, just newspapers and radio, and I could tell whose horse it was by the sound of the hooves coming down the street.

  We had a Christmas party in the village hall every year and all the children got a little present, along with jelly and ice cream. And celebrating on Saint Stephen’s Day with a wren dangling from a stick and the lads dressed like Morris men and calling and carousing with a dance and a dingle and a little jingle or two:

  I followed the wren three miles or more,

  Three miles or more, three miles or more.

  I followed the wren three miles or more

  At six o’clock in the morning.

  Up with the kettle and down with the pan

  And give us a penny to bury the wren.

  They’d be waving a bunch of bee nettles and blind-eyes and creeping jinny. And the robin would whistle-call to its little chicks in the snow and the grown-ups had bellies full of whisky and warm feelings.

  Everybody knew everybody else and there were village fêtes in summer and outings to the seaside and fairs and sporting days, and nothing much changed for years and years. But it’s all gone now, except for the odd memory and melancholy.

  Most work came from farming or from the Arnold Perrett Brewery, which had been around since 1820 and brewed ale until 1924, when it became a cider factory. They stopped making the cider in 1970 and started making the ale again, and they still do to this day. Some villagers travelled the short distance over to Yate, to work for the Parnall Aircraft Company. The site there was built in 1917 by German prisoners-of-war, and it were originally the home of the Royal Flying Corps. There were camps and hostels to cater for the thousands of workers and, on market days, they’d have to plough their way through the sheep and cows teeming the streets. They made ’planes like the Parnall Pike and the Pipit and the Perch and the Parnall Pixie in the years between the wars. When the Second World War came, they made gun turrets for bombers like the Wellington and the Lancaster and the Blenheim and airframes for Spitfires. And there were craters all around the local countryside, where them German blackguards used to lighten their loads before heading home – if they hadn’t got rid of all their bombs upon the industrial towns of Coventry and She
ffield and Nottingham.

  As a boy, I’d ramble the land all around and I knew every inch of it. I’d climb to the top of the Nibley Monument, built in honour of William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament Bible and who used to pray, on a Sunday morning, for the souls of all those still in bed, fornicating. Up a spiral staircase of a hundred and twenty steps and look down over the world to the north, south, east and west. Then there was the Somerset Monument, over near Hawkesbury in honour of Lord Edward Somerset, who was the son of the Duke of Beaufort and fought at Waterloo and was, by all accounts, said to have three testicles. It was on the lands of the Beaufort Estate and other estates like it that I did my poaching.

  The art and craft of poaching goes back before the history books began. It goes back to when a few people believed they owned all the land and others had no right to the game that ran and flew on that land. But a wild animal or a bird is nobody’s property – it’s ‘fair game’, and them who thinks different thinks they own the very air. They no more own the land nor the air than they own the sun or the moon or the stars. Men have always been hunters, long before they became farmers or carpenters or office workers or lorry drivers. We hunted with dogs not too far removed from their wolf ancestors and we used spears and arrows and snares. We hunted to eat and we needed to eat to live.

  A lot of people who complain about poachers and the ways of the wild countryside eat meat that comes from factory farms and is mass-produced and distressing to the animals that live lives of continuous cruelty and die undignified deaths on blood-covered concrete. But, as long as it’s out of their sensitive sight, it’s alright. Everything I hunts and kills as a poacher dies humanely and is eaten or sold on and nothing’s wasted nor thrown away.

  To stop people like us poachers, the lords and ladies and bishops and bigwigs employed roughnecks to do their dirty work for them. They called them ‘foresters’ in olden times and now they’re called gamekeepers. They were brutal lackeys who beat and killed ordinary folk who tried to feed their families by poaching a bird or a beast. In later times, they used the law to fine and imprison poachers, which they still do to some extent today. So, you can see how there was never no love lost between the poacher and the gamekeeper.

  Nowadays a lot of the land belongs to farmers and syndicates who runs shoots for rich businessmen and foreign fat-cats who think, like the lost sailor, that they can buy the wind. And they employ their own bully boys to keep the likes of me away from their game birds and the other wild animals that run on their property. But I’ve never been afraid of any man who takes wages to keep his own kind away from what’s rightfully theirs to hunt and eat, if they’re of a mind to do it. And I’ve faced and fought gamekeepers and wardens as often as I’ve run from ’em.

  Anyway, to get back to my story, I was an only child and I found that to be a disadvantage because you don’t learn about other people and how to deal with this bear-baiting bastard of a world. You don’t know what it’s like to go hungry, or what to do when they’re all about you with big sticks, trying to break your bloody neck. I’m not saying it was all plums and soft-pedal; I had plenty of jobs to do for my father – sawing railway sleepers for firewood and carrying the coal and digging in the big garden. I had to carry water using a yoke, a wooden beam that fitted over my shoulders, with a chain each end and buckets attached to the chain, like a medieval milkmaid. But the work made me strong and I went everywhere with my father. He hunted with whippets and terriers, and he taught me to poach and how to work the dogs. But the first thing he taught me was how to be quiet.

  ‘You’ll never get nothin’ talking.’

  And he was right. I was young then and full of fidgeting like youngsters is and I couldn’t keep still. But he never lost his temper with me and I learned from his example.

  I got my first greyhound when I was about six or seven and I’d take it out with a terrier. The terrier would work the hedges and the greyhound would stalk the outside and catch anything that bolted. This was pre-myxomatosis and there’d be thousands of rabbits quatting in the grass in frosty weather. I learned how to move quietly and creep up on them, which ain’t easy because a rabbit can see backwards as well as forwards. And it was a jumping joy to kick up a hare and have the dog catch it and bring it back without chewing it up and spoiling the meat, and I’d be out every chance I got, roaming the land and breathing the free fresh air of this wild west country.

  My first dog was called Queenie and I loved her like the leaves on the trees. Me and her was inseparable when I was a young ’un. I remember being out with her one rainy day and she caught a rabbit in a small field. She brought it back and, as I leaned over to take it from her, I noticed a hare about two yards in front of me. It was quiet in the grass and not moving. I took some mud off one of my boots and threw it at the hare and it ran. Queenie saw it and took off after it. It made for the hedge to escape, but the dog ran round and forced it back into the field. She was clever enough to keep it in the field until it got tired. Then she killed it. And to see this spectacle – dog after hare, this wild battle of wits – was one of the finest sights in the world.

  The rain eased on the way home and it was just me and Queenie out there under a jet-black sky, with the moon trying to peep out of its cloud pocket and a warm satisfaction round my heart at the young knowing inside me.

  I learned from my father how to read tracks: what’s been this way and that way and how long ago. A boy can learn a lot from early cobwebs across a path or flattened grass or a snapped branch. I learned how to lure pheasants with a drop or two of aniseed in the corn, because they likes it a lot, and how to work with ferrets and how to set snares and traps and nets and lures. Some Gypsies made me a catapult when I was young, with a metal frame and thick, strong, square-shaped rubber and a leather pocket. That thing could do serious damage at close range with a clear view and it was silent and stealthy. I sometimes shot four pheasants in a row with it, and plenty of pigeons at roost in the trees.

  One dull drizzly evening, just as it’s getting dark, I leaves my bicycle in a ditch and creeps out onto the Berkeley Estate. I sees a pheasant at roost and shoots it with my catapult. The bird falls, but gets stuck in a blackthorn bush. I’m about to go in after it, when I sees a keeper approaching. I legs it back to the bike and takes the chain off. The keeper follows me and comes over.

  ‘What you up to, Tovey?’

  They all know me by my name.

  ‘Bike chain’s broken.’

  He looks me up and down to make sure I ain’t carrying nothing. Then he laughs.

  ‘Have to walk home then, won’t you?’

  I wheels the bike until I’m out of sight, then puts the chain back on and comes back after dark for the pheasant. And it was a pure joy to get one over on them keepers and I’d whistle and sing about it, like my father was always doing. I asked him once, ‘Why you always whistling and singing?’

  ‘I’m happy, ain’t I.’

  And that was his nature; he was a happy man. But he could never stray far over the poaching line; because he ran a butcher’s shop he depended on the gentry and the farmers and the people who worked on the land, and he couldn’t afford to go agin’ them too much. He had to tug his forelock to ’em like the rest of the village. But I didn’t, and I got hooked on it – the poaching. It grew on me like a new skin and I couldn’t sleep at night for the urge to be out there in the wild openness. I loved it – the skill of it, the joy of it, the excitement of it.

  That ain’t to say my father was a yes-man, he weren’t. He was a very gentle man – until someone upset him, then he could mix it with the best of ’em. And he always warned me about the monkey-men I’d meet going through life, even if I never took much notice of him at the time.

  He kept ferrets – three Jills and a Hob – and he taught me to hunt with them using hemp purse nets. We’d put the nets over the entrances to rabbit warrens and send the ferrets in. The nets’d close on a draw cord when the rabbits bolted into ’em to get away from the f
errets. We’d set up long nets to cut across where we thought the rabbits would bolt if they got through the purse nets and the animals would get tangled in the loose bagging. The old man would bring his whippets with us and they’d run down any rabbits that escaped the nets. Sometimes the ferrets would kill rabbits underground. When that happened, we’d have to listen with our ears to the ground to hear where they was doing the killing, then we’d dig down with a ditching spade.

  We ate what we needed and my father sold the rest in his shop. The pluck was fed to the dogs and the ferrets, and the skins were sold off to be cured and tanned and used for hats and the collars of coats. Those we caught live were used for spot coursing, to give the dogs a run and keep them up for it – and it ain’t cruel, if that’s what you think, because a greyhound will kill a rabbit quickly, a lot quicker than it rotting away for months from some man-made disease.

  I learned how to set hingles for hares and rabbits, with a noose made of copper wire attached by a cord to a stake driven firmly into the ground. A pricker stick would hold the noose about six inches off the ground for a hare and four fingers for a rabbit. Another stick would be bent over the hingle to make the animal lower its head. Hares run, so the position of the snare weren’t never a big fuss, but rabbits hop and there’s daps in the run. The wire had to be set about three inches above the dap, so the forepaws went under the wire and the head went through, breaking the neck for a quick kill. Them who didn’t know how often set the snares wrong and the forepaws went through and the rabbit was caught round the stomach and it tore all the fur and flesh off itself trying to get free.

  I’d run down my snares in the daytime, in case they was spotted. I’d take the wires off the pricker sticks and hide them in the grass and I’d reset ’em of an evening. But having to visit the snares twice a day was dangerous – double the chance of getting caught. As well as that, if I got a kill, a fox, stoat or badger might take it before I got to collect it. Predators like that would always be out hunting in the dark and would take one or two of my rabbits. So I had to go round a couple of times during the night, take out what I’d caught and reset the wire.